“With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s one of those truisms that’s been echoed in various forms throughout the ages, from the likes of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and even the Spider-man comics. Unfortunately, powerful major corporations like Walmart don’t often take responsibility for their tremendous impact on America and the rest of the world. As Walmart opens its annual shareholder meeting on June 5, we at the Food Chain Workers Alliance urge stockholders and executives alike to consider our newly-released report, Walmart at the Crossroads, which examines the impact of Walmart’s food supply chain on labor and the environment.

Walmart, number one on the Fortune 500 list of American companies, has net sales totaling $473.1 billion. With foodstuffs making up 55 percent of its sales, this corporation controls 25 percent of grocery sales in the U.S. Consequently, Walmart’s actions and inactions reverberate through the food chain,

She was the perfect patriotic icon: Sassy yet dignified, brawny yet feminine – a massive rivet gun cradled on her lap, feet resting on a copy of Mein Kampf. And all the while she holds a sandwich as Old Glory ripples in the background. Mary Doyle Keefe, a Vermont telephone operator who posed for Norman Rockwell’s immortal Rosie the Riveter painting, first publicly seen on a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover, died Tuesday at the age of 92. At the time of her brush with fame, Keefe was Rockwell’s neighbor and a little embarrassed that the artist had pumped iron into the painted arms of the petite 19-year-old.

Rosie the Riveter had too much whimsy and restraint for it to fade into kitsch or agitprop oblivion. Like J. Howard Miller’s equally famous “We Can Do It!” poster, with which it is sometimes confused,